


One foot in the grave

by Emeka



Category: Baroque (Video Games)
Genre: Guro, Incest, M/M, Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Touching, it's weird - Freeform, just in case, tagged for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-11 23:50:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16862314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emeka/pseuds/Emeka
Summary: He'll take his brother back however he can get him.





	One foot in the grave

Give me my brother. Nothing else matters.

Could it even be done? Not even he knew. Yet it was the only thing he would give up the Absolute God's Idea Sephirah for. A new world means nothing to him. He's content to restart again and again for his sins, for God... to see even a shadow of his brother.

Like the shadow he had once seen in the Archangel. But he is older now, more aware of what he wants. A substitute isn't enough.

It can be done, the Archangel tells him, and he sounds like _he_ at least believes it's true. I'll give you your brother back. Then we--

But there won't be a 'we'. He's even less interested in remaking the world himself. Just take this, and if you can... if it's possible...

It never occurs to him to attempt the revival himself. A shroud of guilt and self-doubt hangs in the way, too thick to even consider it. And fear, down bone-deep. 

He returns by himself to where the cemetery once had been. Very little marks it now, but he's been here enough on his own. Just falling on his knees is pure nostalgia. 

But now he does what he has wished all this time to do.

He digs. The ground here has always been dead but the heatwave that swept over it has left it hard and baked. His fingers cut and bleed, but his heart is pounding with an anxious ecstacy. It might not be... but it could be. And in any case, he is reenacting a fantasy of many years.

His flesh and blood waits beneath. They will be united once more.

Eventually he hits wood two feet below, and widens out the whole to encompass the coffin. This part is hard on his palms, but easier over all.

Finally his fingers fan out over the wood, as dead and dull as the dust embedded in his hands. The texture warps and bubbles under his palm, affected by the Blaze even underground. The latch is fused together but breaks off easily. The wood around it pulls off with it in great splinters.

He sets his fingers into the jagged space left for him and pulls, hinges whining, then collapsing under the weight of the lid. He has to brace his shoulder against it to keep it from falling on the precious cargo within.

His heart grows so full with what he sees. His brother's delicate rot-eaten corpse, all bone down to the cracked hip. Dead, by any one's estimation. And yet--perhaps it is wishful thinking--he feels something special from it. The tiny ribs seem to exhale before his eyes.

He takes it out to nurse it for the next few days. Apart from the great heat, the world's distortion occurred gradually over time, so it makes sense the recovery would be the same.

Over the next few days a fibrous red webbing appears on the child skeleton. The start of muscle tissue. Once he wakes in the middle of the night to a sound like a dent in a soda can being popped back out. His brother's hip looks good as new; hopefully it signifies he'll also be reborn with a heart of his own.

There are his own needs to attend to, speaking of hearts. He hunts and eats from Meta-beings he finds still in the area. No good bringing him back if there's no one to come home to. He wants to believe the clones are still being maintained, but who knows what the Archangel is doing. And in any case, he'd hate to miss a moment of this.

Every night he examines his body head to toe.

His soft unformed flesh is tender in his mouth... the baby toes and tiny nails, thin crooked shins that haven't undergone the therapy he has to walk properly after a childhood of bedrest. Electrical stimulation had only done so much. The urge strikes him every time he touches the tibia to try to force it straight, even though he knows it wouldn't work. L'appel du vide by proxy.

The first few days he can stick his fingers between his fibula and tibula, into the joint of the patella where he could catch himself in the joint like catching his fingers in a closed door. 

His femurs follow the same swerved line up to the hip, now whole and unblemished--why that and not his legs? Maybe recovery is a deliberate attempt through the Archangel's intention. He would remember the heart, of course, and the hip, as they are the things most involved with their separation, and the muscles and vessels will naturally right themselves without an extra body to attach to. But the legs wouldn't be important, wouldn't occur to him.

It's fine. Actually, the idea of accustoming his brother to walking appeals to him.

A viscuous quivering bag of guts knits itself into existence in the cradle of his pelvis, growing larger until it spills down over the knobs of his spinal cord. (By the end, before it's entirely covered by a wall of abdominal muscles, it thrashes and squirms about like a ball of unruly snakes. How much of the wasteland dust is inside him?)

His ribs continue expanding and inhaling like a maw readying to bite. Between the jailbar slats his lungs bloom like growing balloons. The beginnings of the precious heart waits beneath the sternum. It won't beat for another two weeks. Not until the beginning.

He runs his tongue and bit-open lips all over his brother's life-giving insides while he can, staining his face in his blood, their blood, connected once again. How could anyone's ribs be so small? So ready to be snapped? That call again, the void. He can feel his lungs filling in his hand with air. Breathing and life are so interconnected it doesn't surprise him it's how his body begins. The two terms have always felt connected inside his mouth, forming _iki_ with a small pulse of air, speaking one and feeling both.

Their teeth bump together as he cradles his skull. He speaks into his mouth. Breathe. Live.

Brother's skin follows shortly after the forming of his meaty coccoon, covering him in a smooth white expanse. It takes time to tighten up and settle in, to look less like a loose-fitting suit, and more like something that flatters him, showing to advantage the fine bones of his wrists and the delicate jaw. His genitals begin their showing at the same time. Maybe at this point where he is truly 'naked' he should be at least covered; but there's no one out here but them, and they've grown up together sharing beds and baths with no sense of modesty. And is it really more intimate than seeing his insides?

He still kisses him, baby toes and all, and notices the flesh thickening and contorting on his left hip. In this life, his brother never lived to have this scar. Maybe he has it for the same reason he does his heart.

Hair is next to grow in. Mostly on his head, the thick mop of blue-black, then the eyebrows, and two sooty lines of eyelashes around marbled eyeholes. Everything else is just peach fuzz. This too, he barely feels if he keeps his eyes closed and concentrates, like a whisper on his lips. The round cheek, skinny legs and forearms, the hollowed belly.

Brother's pubic mound is silky smooth, slightly fatty, as his own had been at that age. He had been something of a late bloomer, due to their health problems and inevitable nutritional deficiencies. Brother probably won't start for a while either. It's sad they can't be the same.

Seeing his brother change is the only change he has. Everything else must take so much longer than one dead boy... a whole dead world. He can't imagine. But he hopes one day they'll see a normal sky.

Until then, he'll wonder if maybe the ground isn't a little softer than it used to be, as he kneels between his brother's thighs and kisses his thighs and penis with a sensation of worshipping at some altar.

It has been nearly a month since he dug up his brother's body when he feels his heartbeat sluggishly pump in his neck, on his lips. The vein stands out; he can even see it pulse. Yet there is still no awareness on his face. He even pulls up the translucent blue lids to look at his eyes, but there is no awakening, no recognition. His irises draw in to accomodate the sudden light, and that's all.

It makes him hungry. He's so close to having him back again. He restlessly squeezes his hand every night as he lays beside him, hip to hip as close as can be to try to bring him back.

Three nights. Five nights. He starts to feel a caged terror; what if he never wakes? If this breathing corpse is all he gets? The only way he could bear it is if he... if he

(baroque)

but on the seventh night as he kisses him, he feels a soft touch at his elbow, and brother's eyes slowly open. Their mouths part in expectation of something to be said, breath mingling.

Ah. Of course. He smiles, and nuzzles their foreheads together. In this first moment of life, he wants to be the only thing his still hazy, confused eyes see.

"Welcome back."

**Author's Note:**

> Little over half a year ago I started writing here, and opened with a Baroque piece. I have twenty stories posted now, so for my twenty-first, the start of my first 'next!' page of works, I decided to do... well, call it an anniversary.


End file.
